Any more ideas for the kick-off date? The 14th of March would mean a whole month. Won't the focus be diluted too much if we do that? Also, it would give very little time to sign up.

On the other hand, I don't mind if you already want to get started.

I was thinking we need another sort of motivational rule. The ***-hacks motivate through peer pressure. In the case of speedhack, the pressure comes from votes. In the case of krampushack, the pressure is in the form of not letting down your secret santa. For EasterHack, voting is tricky because you're not starting from scratch. But we could do a round of reviews. If we pre-assign reviewers, then it would be sort of like secret santa, but without the whole secrecy business.

Or maybe we could use the Seinfeld strategy and make the rule that you have to post a progress update every day during the competition, or you're out. It's just an idea at this point, let me know what you think.

You're right, it's been almost a year. Personally, I'm looking for an opportunity to work on an old game rather than create a new one. However, one does not have to preclude the other. If there is sufficient interest, I might do a TINS soon after EasterHack, maybe somewhere around June.

Haha - I invision a logo for Easter Hack with a game controller rising from the grave. A game is risen again.

I think a week of hacking is ideal for hackathon, starting on a Friday (so you can get a whole weekend) and ending on a Friday (so you can recover before the next work week). The only down side to that plan is you would be working during the work week your game would be due on Friday. (I really like "cheating" by doing some light preliminary work before the actual hack starts.)

With month of hacking, it's a little too easy to let it slide. Also, I feel like 72 hours isn't enough to get something good, as it gets harder to pull all-nighters as we get older.

We could vote on areas of "most improved". For example, a star rating from 1 to 5 in different categories:

The 14th of March would mean a whole month. Won't the focus be diluted too much if we do that? Also, it would give very little time to sign up.

Sorry, I meant the 14th of April. That would start on Friday and end on Sunday, like "traditional" hacks do. But I'm cool with a longer time, too (pulling an all-nighter is tough these days).

The concept of taking a working game and building upon it is nice. I've only made two previous games so far, and neither of them I care to extend though. Oh, and the code is totally spaghetti. I'll still give it a shot though.

EditI think voting on improvements might marginalize contestants who decided to make a totally new game, rather than improving on old ones (especially if they haven't made a lot of games before).

How do you feel about doing the competition from 8 to 16 April? So that is a full week plus an extra weekend day. That's a period that is similar to Krampushack.

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Voting on "most improvement" is difficult to do right, because you might not know how the game was at the start, which means that essentially you'll have to review two games, and it's easy to miss small things. That means you'll have to rely more on the evidence provided, e.g. documentation and progress logs.

Why not keep it simple an vote directly on the progress logs instead? Seriously, think about it. The motivation factor is there. Trying to have good entertaining logs with lots of interesting content is only possible if you make progress on your entry. And besides, marketing is an important indie developer skill.